Brian Webster - Blog

Today, I read an interesting blog post titled “Make about:blank Your Homepage.” For the most part, I agree with what this article says, about:blank does make a good default homepage, especially in Internet Explorer. However, for about the last year, I’ve approached this a little differently in Firefox.

I use Firefox as my primary web browser. Currently I have Google set up as the homepage, but I don’t see this homepage unless I click on the Home button in the toolbar. Firefox has another option that allows you to have a homepage set up, and also a blank startup page when you open the browser.

To set this up:

1. Select Tools–>Options…
2. Make sure you’re on the Main tab
3. Set your homepage to whatever you want
4. In the dropdown list titled “When Firefox starts:”, select Open a blank page

That’s it. Now, when you open Firefox, it won’t waste time opening a homepage. You can proceed to whatever web site you want. You can click on the home button to go to the page you’ve configured as your home page.

I find this works extremely well for me, because I rarely go to the same page each time I open my browser.

Last week, I was talking with Lynette about a problem she was having with a web page. During the conversation, she said she usually uses Firefox, however there are a few pages in which she needs to use IE. I told her about a Firefox Add-on I use called “IE View Lite“.

When you have IE View Lite installed, it adds an option in the right-click menu for “View This Page in IE”. This makes it very easy to switch to IE when you run across a page that doesn’t work in Firefox. Simply right click on the page, and select this new option in the dropdown menu. If this is a page you need to use a lot, you can configure IE View Lite to always use IE  for that page.

While useful for normal users of the web, I consider this tool a must have for web developers/designers. It allows you to use Firefox for your development, then easily switch to IE to find out what IE breaks.